Bookclub session 6/26/99

Book and Resources

Review

Place

Soyeba's apartment in San Francisco

Food

chips appetizer with salsa
curry chicken and 'squash medley' with shrimps
strawberry/chocolate dessert

Attendees

Charlene, Darija & Branko, Soyeba & Holger, Sonya, Paul, Lorena & her Paul

Minutes

The Bookclub welcomes 3 new members: Darija, Lorena & Paul (bummer, now we have two 'Paul's in the Club - oh well).

Besides the fact that a new record was set in terms of number of BARF participants, the number of people who actually read the book to its ending reached a new low record, too.
Other than Charlene, who read the book before  BARF's existence, it was only Paul who could claim to have read every page during the month we were supposed to read it.

Interestingly enough, Paul also was the only one who could provide a complete 'outsider' view of the book, since he happened to be the only one at the Bookclub meeting who did not immigrate to the US (although one could argue that he immigrated to California ;-).

So, aside from Paul (representing the 'native' tribe) we were 8 different nations in the meeting (Argentina, Bangladesh, China, Croatia, Denmark, India, Germany and Serbia) which led to a lively discussion about all the different experiences of living in a new language/culture.

Apart from the challenge of managing the 'cultural shock' of living in the USA, we were also talking a lot about the 'translatability' of words or phrases.

The latter one led to a amusing comparison: since we had so many different nations on the table, we created a table that shows how animal sounds are translated in the different languages. Unfortunately I don't have any sound samples, yet (the spelling doesn't fully capture all of the sometimes rather interesting differences between the languages); so in the picture below, Paul and Lorena tried the universal approach of expressing an animal with pantomime:

(take a guess what animal is imitated in the picture; the intended answer can be found here)

We hereby learned that China is not only lacking in erotic experiences (as we know from last meeting ;-), but also in expressing animal voices. Other than that, we agreed that the highlight of the international animal sound comparison is the Bengali cow.

While looking for the next book to read, we finally came up with a more 'sexy' choise: "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller, which could make one believe that the next Bookclub meeting could even be more interesting. The fact that it seems to contain sufficiently enough of everyone's favourite topic made up for the fact that it breaks the rule of it being a book from a dead white male - but then again: that rule was introduced to be broken, anyway - as every BARF rule for that matter.
The book was chosen over the The Physics of Sunset and Henry and June.

And maybe, next time Sonya will find the answer to the question whether it's ruly to 'date' a married man without jeopardizing any feelings or relationships. ;-)

See'ya next time,
Holger.

Attachment:

International Animal Sounds

(that's the table we came up with at the meeting)

additional resources:

© Holger Antelmann 1997-2005
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